As electronic mail (email) increases in popularity, it has become the norm for a user to maintain several separate mailboxes to help manage their email. Typically, the user will have a mailbox dedicated to corporate email and another mailbox dedicated to personal email. Some users have additional mailboxes. For example, these additional email addresses are used when registering for services on the Internet.
Managing multiple mailboxes can be challenging because the user has to check periodically each mailbox for new email. Services such as Yahoo™ now provide mailbox services that automatically poll a predefined list of mailboxes to determine if new email has been received. New emails that have been received in any of the polled mailboxes are retrieved into the requesting mailbox. As a result, the user only has to check the requesting mailbox to determine if new email has arrived in any of the other mailboxes. This reduces the number of mailboxes that are required to be checked periodically. Other services allow a user to access their mailboxes through a plurality of devices such as, but not limited to, mobile phones, mobile computing devices, for example, personal digital assistants (POA's) and other communications devices.
Each of the separate mailboxes has a unique set of configuration parameters, such as a mailbox server name or a mailbox server address. Additionally, as part of these configuration parameters, each of the mailboxes may be implemented in one of a variety of mailbox protocols, such as Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), giving rise to differing sets of configuration parameters for each of the mailboxes. Typically, the user would have to determine these configuration parameters for each of the mailboxes and configure manually a web service associated with a web server to access each of the mailboxes.
One proposal in U.S. patent application publication no. 2002/0174194 provides a single web-based interface that gives the user access to a plurality of different message accounts on different message servers. This proposal allows email clients to access only a subset, namely messaging, of an IMAP server, and requires a user to establish all configuration parameters for the IMAP server functionality. Other similar proposals requiring a user to determine and manually configure a web service for configuration parameters are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,968,117 and U.S. published patent application no. 2002/0112007, where message sources are established during setup and a technical support can be called. U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,114 discloses the use of an agent that searches a user database to determine a list of messaging systems the user subscribes. The agent recalls from an application database any procedures for accessing the messaging systems and logs onto each messaging system to retrieve new messages.